When the US Supreme Court decided last year to extend full First Amendment protections to video games, many likely thought that was the last word on potential legal assaults on the medium. That's not the case though, as an Oklahoma lawmaker has now proposed a special tax to be focused on "violent video games."

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place three years after Final Fantasy XIII. Vanille, Fang, Snow and Lightning are gone; either dead, encased in crystal or disappeared to unknown adventures. Serah Farron, Lightning's sister and Snow's fiancé, hides her pain while teaching the children of New Bodhum and helping her friends in NORA. Images of Lightning engaged in an epic battle haunt her dreams, but she knows her sister is gone forever.

What happened to Final Fantasy? The elaborate narrative and groundbreaking graphics of Final Fantasy VII turned the franchise from a significant cult favorite into a mainstream blockbuster in 1997. Since then, though, almost every Final Fantasy has struggled to find the correct balance between game and story, with CGI cut-scenes and anime clichés taking up as much time as the gameplay.

Calling Double Fine Happy Action Theater (DFHAT) a game might not marry well with many people's definition of what a game is. A game usually has clearly stated goals and strictly defined rules that describe how you could fail to reach those goals. In DFHAT, on the other hand, it's literally impossible to either win or fail in any of 18 myraid scenes, which each use the Kinect 3D camera to transform your living room in various ways.

The instructions underneath VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh's new browser-based MMO ChatChat simply read: "be a cat." These instructions also describe a dream I held between the ages of 5 and 7, so I'm eager to finally see if my dreams were realistic. Below is a short, diary-style description of my first hour as a cat.

At the heart of the great used game debate are legitimate fears—on both sides of the divide. Gamers are worried about their right to buy and sell games they legally bought without technological hindrance or lost content. Publishers are afraid new game sales are unsustainable when cheaper, functionally identical used versions are available mere days after release. Meanwhile, major retailer GameStop rakes in what's estimated to be billions of dollars from the used game market.

Is there a better way? Mike Kennedy seems to think so. He's setting up a new used game trading site called Parcel Gamer that he thinks can satisfy both publishers and gamers,  while also undercutting GameStop's high-margin business model.

MMO operators are faced with a constant battle with hackers, gold farmers, and other exploiters, working tirelessly to identify and ban them before they can ruin the experience for honest players. But En Masse, the North American publisher of upcoming MMO TERA has announced a much simpler plan for stopping ne'er-do-wells from getting into its North American servers—simply block large swathes of the world from playing on its servers.

AVSEQ (pronounced ay-vee-seck, I'm told) stands for Audiovisual Sequencer, putting it in a class of abstract, interactive audiovisual experiments that runs from Simon all the way through and past Electroplankton. It's a tough game to evaluate as a whole, though, because the "audiovisual" portion and the "sequencer" portion, both interesting in their own right, fail to mesh together in a satisfying way and each seem to actively work against the enjoyment of the other.

Like thousands of others, I was incredibly impressed with this fake, animated trailer for an imaginary, Wind Waker-inspired Legend of Zelda game. The short video manages to capture the series' feeling of epic adventure and thrilling action in an entirely new and exciting way. Yet the more I watched the trailer and really thought about how it would translate to an actual game experience, the more I realized that this is just another example of a passive film doing things in a way that would be difficult or impossible to pull off in an interactive game.